In this paper I discuss the history of political concepts of legitimate sacrifice in the settler colonial United States. Settler colonial expansion, coidentified with the modernization of the “New World”, implicitly framed the sacrifice of Indigenous people, lifeways, and landholdings as a precondition for the settler population’s future prosperity. Meanwhile, settler imaginaries of Indigenous sacrificial violence informed a history of anthropological research that demonstrated, as Brenda Romero describes, “a common tendency to attribute all forms of inhumanity to the Indians and ignoring European forms of violence” (2007, 67).
In this paper, I aim to muddy a disciplinary divide which isolates research of Indigenous sacrificial ceremony from colonial ceremonies of statesanctioned death. I contextualize the ceremony of capital punishment as an act which attempts the political enforcement of cosmic balance – a life for a life. Thinking through how concepts of justice in the modern nation state continue to rely on cosmic balance, I turn to the Pawnee Morning Star Ceremony, much sensationalized for its sacred violence, and to concepts of cosmic balance inscribed in its anthropological record. Herein I argue an approach which centers the study of ceremony as a means by which a settler-Indigenous history of sacrifice might be reconceived.